Proponents of the non-agency MBS market continue to work on initiatives to revive the market, with progress somewhat slow but steady. The Treasury Department and the Structured Finance Industry Group are facilitating separate efforts to entice investors to buy new non-agency MBS. At the ABS Vegas conference sponsored by the Structured Finance Industry Group and Information Management Network this week, Olga Gorodetsky, a senior policy advisor at the Treasury, said there’s no timeframe for when the benchmark non-agency MBS the Treasury is trying to facilitate might be issued. “It will be market driven,” she said. Gorodetsky said...[Includes one data chart]

Standard & Poor’s emerged as the top rating service in both non-agency MBS and non-mortgage ABS securitizations in 2014, according to a new Inside MBS & ABS ranking. S&P rated $8.91 billion of non-agency MBS last year, or 25.4 percent of total issuance. Rating information is not available on most scratch-and-dent transactions and re-securitizations that are typically issued as private placements. S&P’s market share was down from 40.0 percent of non-agency MBS issued in 2013, when there were more transactions with multiple ratings. DBRS, which reports its ratings on re-securitizations, actually was involved...[Includes two data charts]

The Department of Justice and other allied parties this week reached a $1.375 billion settlement with Standard & Poor’s to resolve allegations that the firm’s investment-grade ratings misled investors into buying securities backed by badly underwritten mortgages. The agreement resolves the DOJ’s 2013 lawsuit against S&P and its parent, McGraw Hill Financial Inc., along with the suits filed by 19 states and the District of Columbia. Each of the lawsuits alleges that investors incurred substantial losses on residential MBS and collateralized debt obligations that carried S&P’s ‘AAA’ ratings, which effectively masked their true credit risks. S&P was accused...

If issuers were to include agency-eligible mortgages with slightly less than pristine underwriting standards in new non-agency mortgage-backed securities, the deals could receive ratings with credit enhancement levels similar to the levels on recent jumbo MBS, according to the results of an exercise released this week by the Treasury Department. Treasury asked six rating services to assign ratings to hypothetical non-agency MBS comprised of $19.75 billion of mortgages ...

After loosening every month for more than a year, underwriting on jumbo mortgages started to tighten in mid-2014, according to new data from the Mortgage Bankers Association and AllRegs. In the past three months, jumbo underwriting has started to loosen again and standards are the loosest they have been since early 2011.Angel Oak Mortgage Solutions announced that it launched a mini-correspondent offering for non-agency nonprime ... [Includes three briefs]

Sales of mortgage servicing rights by big banks will continue to be driven by the desire to reduce the handling of delinquent mortgages – not by Basel III capital requirements, according to analysts at Moody’s Investors Service. Nonbank servicers that have grown in recent years often cite Basel capital requirements as a significant factor in bank sales of MSRs. Warren Kornfeld, a senior vice president at Moody’s, noted that Bank of America, Citigroup and JPMorgan Chase were active sellers of MSRs in recent years. “We believe the sales were primarily motivated by their desire to reduce credit-impaired servicing volume,” he said. Under Basel III, banks face...

Standard & Poor’s surveillance of seasoned non-agency mortgage-backed securities backed by jumbo mortgages and Alt A loans played a factor in the $77 million settlement the rating service reached this week with regulators. The Securities and Exchange Commission and state attorneys general for New York and Massachusetts largely focused their settlement with S&P on ratings for commercial MBS. Just $1.0 million of the settlement concerned surveillance of non-agency MBS ...

Production of loans with a VA guaranty was moderately strong in the third quarter of 2014, thanks to lower rates and increased demand for the no-downpayment loans, according to Inside FHA Lending’s analysis of the latest agency data. A 14.1 percent quarter-to-quarter surge helped the industry end last year’s first nine months with a total of $76.3 billion in VA loans, mostly purchase home mortgages taken out by a younger generation of war veterans. VA streamline refinancing also accounted for a substantial chunk of originations, 19.2 percent. Volume jumped from $19.5 billion in the first quarter of 2014 to $26.5 billion the following quarter. Lenders closed out the third quarter with $30.2 billion. Stanley Middleman, chief executive officer of Freedom Mortgage, said VA lending is on the upswing, driven by low interest rates. He thinks the VA home loan guaranty program has been ... [ 1 chart ]

More than a year after issuing ratings for the first-ever single-family rental securitization, Moody’s Investors Service has issued its finalized approach for rating such deals. The rating service is also prepared to rate multi-borrower SFR transactions, a type of deal that has yet to be issued. Moody’s analysis of SFR securitizations was previously based largely on the approach the rating service applies to large loan commercial MBS backed by multifamily housing. The new criteria from Moody’s include...

Risk weights established by the Basel Committee on Banking Supervision for holdings of securitized assets won’t have much of an impact on U.S. banks, according to analysts at Barclays Capital. It’s unclear which banks the risk weights will be applied to and many U.S. banks have transitioned to similar methods to evaluate capital requirements for their holdings of MBS and ABS. The BCBS issued a revised framework for calculating risk weights on banks’ securitization exposures in December. The framework is set to take effect in certain countries beginning in 2018. It was issued to address concerns that banks were holding insufficient capital for certain securitized assets and to reduce the reliance on external ratings to derive securitization risk weights. Barclays said...